Does Your Love Need A Label?

Lesbian, gay, bisexual…in an era when celebrities and everyday people are proudly declaring their sexual fluidity, do we still need orientation labels? michelle tea explores how we got to this new frontier of sexual identity a and where we go from here.

- Michelle Tea

In my early 20s, in the candlelight of an apartment, I kissed a girl. It was immediately my favorite thing to do. I wanted my boyfriend to go away forever. Oh my god, I’m a lesbian! I thought.

As Jessica became my first girl, my boyfriend became, for quite some time, my last boy. Sex with him had always felt blatant and pre-configured. The sex I entered into with Jessica was a dark forest, a fairy tale you get lost in. I realized that with men, a part of my heart was on high alert always. With my boyfriend, some essential part of myself was not at play in the sex we’d had. Yet within moments, Jessica, this stranger, had access to it all. I was whole.

I wanted to build my life around this experience, and I did. Revising my hetero history, I decided the eyeliner-wearing Goth boys I pursued in high school were simply the closest I could come at the time to a girl. I got rid of my thrift-store lace dresses and popped on a baseball cap with Dyke emblazoned above the brim. I hit Goodwill in search of Little League T-shirts to wear with cutoff army pants. I shaved my head. There—I was a dyke, I’d always been a dyke, and I’d always be a dyke. Now, buzz off!

Coming out in the early ’90s, at a time when the fight for gay rights was gaining ground, a solid, even confrontational sexual identity was demanded (we were born this way, dammit!). Anything less was seen as wishy-washy, smacking of internalized homophobia. For gay women, an interest in men marked one as a traitor to queerness and feminism. People who identified as bisexual were schemers looking to keep one foot in the world of heterosexual privilege. As for those who opted out of a sexual identity, well, they were quite possibly insane.